Bookie did not have the same qualms Pareth had about following orders, but he was also not nearly as proficient with bladed weapons, leaving Sofia with a slit throat that didn’t bleed.
That’s… A bit uncomfortable. Aaaaand it’s healed. Simple clean cuts really don’t last long if the two sides of the skin can touch again. Health hasn’t gone back up but the skin still fixed itself.
Trying and failing to speak indicated that on the inside, her throat was still messed up.
Well, the rune is preventing healing… Try again, Bookie, line up the dagger a bit better alright?
Bookie nodded and slashed at Sofia’s neck again. It was a cleaner strike, going right through her spine. Sofia’s head fell on the bed, the streams of light connected to it flowing out of her now lifeless body to follow the head. She couldn’t see more as she fell face first on the bed sheets.
Somehow, this isn’t what I had imagined.
Health : 20 245 / 80 980
Exactly a quarter of my health remains. For just the head? More than I would have expected. It’s weird to think I’m just a head right now.
As Sofia was analyzing her situation, Pareth picked her head up.
OoOooh, hoy, warn me first!
Being just a head… I feel a bit vulnerable.
Now freed from the bedsheets, Sofia could look at her lifeless body on the ground and at her ‘body’ of light following her head like a dangling ghost.
I can survive like that. Yeah… Definitely not really human anymore, am I? If I ever get trapped I can escape like a lizard cutting its tail, just by cutting my body instead. Actually… I want to try something, can you put me down on the bed again, please?
Pareth gently put Sofia’s head between two cushions.
This… I feel like it should work, as ridiculous as it is.
Sofia dumped a bunch of bones from her storage right on top of the bed, and started sculpting a headless replica of her body. Once she was done, she controlled it to pick her head up.
It’s not very easy to control such a big lump of melded bones, a bit too rigid. Still, let’s try.
Slowly, Sofia brought her head to the flat neck of the bone body. Only to realize that the veins of light wouldn’t get inside. Twenty seconds of experimenting later, she understood that if the veins of light were to inhabit that bone shell, she would have to carve out the paths inside of it for the light to flow through.
Too much work… I’ll take time to prepare one for the trial just in case, it’d be nice to have a replacement body ready, it should be much easier to control when my ‘blood’ flows inside it just like reshaping my own bones is easier than otherwise.
To think this whole thing is possible with just [Bone dominus] and [Venerable physique of the primeval void]. Two skills.
Ah, well, not quite. [Heat Death] is what’s providing the energy, it’s also why I kept all my mana. I’m pretty sure I’d eventually starve if not for that, pretty quickly, probably.
Alright, enough testing.
The arms of the bone body slowly reached up, still very rigid in their movements, and picked up the head from the neck.
Get my body up, Pareth.
With Pareth propping up the limp headless body of Sofia, she carefully controlled the bone body to put her head back where it belonged. The veins of light flew right back into the body, and Sofia could sense her mana spreading back into the entire body. The only issue was that the body and head were still only just stacked on top of each other. Like before, the skin quickly stuck to itself, reconnecting the head, but everything inside was still separated. Sofia couldn’t feel her body at all. The unlife rune prevented healing so she either had to dispel it or kill herself if she wanted to fix the issue.
Somehow I’m a bit uncomfortable at the thought of dispelling the rune when my head isn’t properly connected to my body… Logically it should be perfectly safe though.
The rune gone, the simple presence of Pareth as a blessed construct of [Bone dominus] gave enough regeneration to quickly reconnect the bone, tissues and nerves inside of Sofia’s neck, finally giving her control of her body back.
“Oww, I feel all tingly. I think the body suffered a bit from the lack of blood,” she told Pareth and Bookie.
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Well, ‘blood’. Light? Blood-light?
As she had expected, reconnecting the head to the body also got her health back up to full instantly.
That almost makes me want to try to see which limbs are worth how much health, but that’s enough self mutilation for today… Let’s see what my venerable physique has to say.
[Venerable physique of the primeval void] ♢ - Third step of the Light forging realm :
Light forging realm :
Starting step : You no longer age.
First step : Your skin becomes tougher and opaque (1000/1000%)
Second step : Your blood becomes light (126 441 / 126 441 drops converted)
Third step : Your nerves and brain become light (0/100%)
Fourth step : Enhances your appearance through the use of light.
Fifth step : ???
Current step training method : Consume nerve-damaging substances.
“I see. Very straightforward, at least.”
Nerves and brain… I wonder what’s left for the last step? All remaining organs? I’d like to at least still look human by the end of this… But it does feel like the fourth step might not help with that. Enhance my appearance, huh? I’ll trust you, Mr. Scribe, but I’m dubious. Hopefully the training for that is easy, considering how useless it sounds.
Too bad I don’t have any silverwater left. Do I have any other poison left?
Right I have this, still. Sofia thought as she summoned the flask of brown powder that one student had tried to poison Shaily with.
[Silent Death] : Dangerous refined toxin, this poison is hard to produce even for renowned alchemists. In sufficient doses, causes a swift death by sudden brain and nervous tissue necrosis after an incubation period of four to five hours. Effective on most hot-blooded creatures under level 200.
Item level : 200. Grade : Precious.
That’s actually perfect.
Sofia opened the flask of brown powder and swallowed the entirety of its contents.
“Wasn’t the reason we couldn’t eat more stat candies due to some kind of poisoning? Ah but Alith said it can reduce stats I think… That’s a risky gamble but it might be worth a try. If I can even get the stats from a single one then the poisoning from the next might not be enough to remove it all. I’ll see…”
Sofia walked around in her room while looking in her storage to see if she was forgetting anything. She was stopped by Bookie pulling on her shirt.
“Yes?” she asked the small skeleton, to which he brought out his book form, and opened it at a certain page Sofia hardly ever used.
“Oh! The poisonous plant mage hero!”
There were a few flower pots around that Sofia had made for her room as decoration to make the place less drab while she worked on her blood, she had filled them with dirt but forgot to ever actually plant anything. It ended up being the perfect setting for the useless plant mage to finally shine.
[Solar Blossommancer - Lv. 249]
Health : 6225/6225
Stamina : 6225/6225
Mana : 37 350/37 350
Lifetime : 14 938s/14 940s
Awful stats… “Alright, you’ve got dirt to work with this time, so make me some good poison!”
The very normal-looking skeleton had no kind of equipment at all, which was rare for Bookie’s humanoid skeletons; it just kneeled before two of the flower pots and shoved a skeletal hand in the dirt of each.
From the left one grew a bunch of tightly packed blue star-shaped flowers, and from the right one, a single big orange flower with four large oval petals in the center of which grew a long sausage-like purple fruit.
The skeleton stood up and looked up at Sofia with his arms crossed, visibly proud of his job.
This one has an attitude.
“That’s all you have?” she asked.
The skeleton nodded, still looking confident.
“Alright, I get the fruit, but what about the other ones? Am I supposed to eat them too?”
The skeleton shook his head, he very carefully plucked a star-shaped flower and brought it up to the nose-hole of his skull, mimicking the act of smelling it.
Oh, makes sense. Let’s try these… Maybe I should cast a fake immortality rune first, just in case. Just in case…
The rune up, Sofia grabbed the long purple fruit and bit right into it. It had a thin skin and was full of juice-filled bubbles that popped in Sofia’s mouth. The juice was slightly sour like a weak lemon. Before she could even swallow, the contact of the juice with her mouth sent waves of heat along her throat and up her face.
Stronger than I expected.
Sofia stored the rest of the fruit and carefully monitored her condition.
A sensation of numb pain followed the heat, and the mere contact of her clothes on her upper body felt a bit like wearing sheets of molten steel.
“Not very comfortable… I might have underestimated that skeleton’s abilities, this could be useful. Maybe… Then again, my health is barely moving.”
[Venerable physique of the primeval void] ♢ - Third step of the Light forging realm :
Third step : Your nerves and brain become light (0.16/100%)
This as well isn’t moving much. It is moving, though. That’s a start.
Time to pay Alith a visit. If that’s not enough then I’ll ask Eternam too, surely the Alchemy teacher and necromancer would have a few exotic poisons to let me buy…
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